Opinion: PAL Fighters to get shafted, again

December 19, 2006, 07:58 AM

by james, via Europe -
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It's already old news, but it bears repeating - Nintendo's Virtual Console is shipping inferior PAL revision ROMs to European Wii owners. To blame? The company's policy of sticking to the original territorial releases, which means Sonic the Hedgehog running at 17% less the speed of the Japanese and American revisions and completing the cavalcade of Sonic-related kicks to the groin this fiscal quarter. Any game that did not recieve a competent port from the NTSC standard to the PAL standard at the time of original release will run at around 83% speed on PAL Wii Consoles and have intrusive borders, thanks to lazy business practices of the 1980s and 1990s.

What does this mean? It means titles like Gunstar Heroes will be resold to Europe with their tempo, graphics and BGMs ruined all over again. It also means that American Wii owners already recieved an inferior revison of Sonic 1 (the Japanese release had extra scrolling and underwater effects) and that the USA gets to miss out on Alien Soldier. Again. For the second time.

Can this policy be justified? Does selling nostalgia mean that the customers of today have to suffer the lovely nostalgic mistakes of 1991? It's doubtful - many independant retailers back then did roaring trade in imported NTSC consoles for precisely the same reasons that I'm now bemoaning, with a fair few Japanese PC Engines sold in the UK to boot (see Stuart Campbell's Panel 4 archive for a contemporary viewpoint). Why release shitty ports? Why should the scanty release timetables of yesteryear be inflicted upon the beating heart of today? People hardly remember five minutes ago, man! Nintendo has been showing a remarkable deal of common sense since Iwata took over the reins, so make your voices heard... somehow.